They also get counseling to help them juggle their responsibilities, and many students end up working their way up the corporate ladder at UPS after they graduate. It’s not just tuition: Students also receive benefits such as health insurance, and are paid bonuses for finishing college and the semester. “It’s a win-win because it has stabilized our workforce considerably, and the Commonwealth gets a much better-educated workforce,” Mike Mangeot, a UPS spokesman, told me as we drove around the busy airport-the largest automated package-handling facility in the world-at three in the morning. But can college students really work the night shift five nights a week and stay alert enough at school to understand what was happening in their classes? Since then, turnover on the night shift has dropped from 70 percent to 20 percent annually, and 14,000 students have worked at UPS while attending school. Together, the full-tuition benefit would be enough to keep night-shift workers on the rolls.
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Their proposal: City government would pay half of students’ tuition UPS the other half. When UPS threatened to locate an expansion of its busy air hub elsewhere, state and city leaders held an emergency meeting to come up with an idea for retaining workers. (Student workers now make $10 an hour, but when the program started, they made $8.50.) It was also having labor problems: In 1997, the Teamsters held a 15-day strike at UPS demanding more part-time jobs and higher wages at the company. The program was created in the late 1990s after UPS had trouble with turnover: In a booming economy, at the wages it was paying, the company couldn’t keep workers on the night shift for more than a month or two. (Metropolitan College isn’t a university itself, just the name of the program.) Of the 6,000 people working there on any given night shift, about 2,000 of them are in the Metropolitan College program, which gives in-state tuition to the night-shift workers to attend either the University of Louisville or Jefferson Community and Technical College during the day.
#ALL NIGHT LONG FULL#
Monday through Friday and you’ll see many students like McLin sorting mail envelopes, dragging heavy containers full of packages to and from airplanes, and unloading carts of mail onto conveyor belts, 155 miles of which chug around the facility.
![all night long all night long](https://www.easternkicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ALNIGHTLONG2-1272x679.jpg)
![all night long all night long](http://p2.music.126.net/AYG9NPyP4tovGK1vF4m7ng==/109951166129814140.jpg)
Tour the UPS facility between midnight and 4 a.m. “I’ve become more responsible and more organized with my time.” “It was really hard in the beginning, but I got used to it,” the junior told me. She works five nights a week at UPS from midnight until 4:30 a.m., and still finds time to go to classes, participate in color guard, and fulfill student-teaching responsibilities.
![all night long all night long](https://cdn.albumoftheyear.org/album/149519-all-night-long-all-night.jpg)
But even her family is incredulous at the hours she keeps. Indeed, McLin, a chipper redhead whom I interviewed at the UPS facility at two in the morning last week, told me this was the only way she could attend college, as her family can’t afford the tuition. The program, called Metropolitan College, has been held up as a model of a public-private partnership, helping students pay for school while filling holes in the workforce.
#ALL NIGHT LONG FOR FREE#
It wasn’t an unusual day for McLin, who is attending the University of Louisville for free through a program that pays her tuition if she works the overnight shift at UPS and keeps her grades above a C. Alexis McLin at the UPS offices (Alana Semuels)